Cloud Computing

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud approaches as well as services such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are being embraced for cost efficiency, scalability, and consolidation. Hypervisor technologies, Open Source versus Proprietary Hypervisor technologies, Security, Open Standards, Interoperability, High Availability, and Backup & Recovery are among the issues that are critical to consider when evaluating a move to the cloud.

Cloud Computing Articles

As 2017 winds down and a new year comes into view, Amit Zavery, senior VP, Product Development, Oracle Cloud Platform & Middleware, offered three predictions about cloud, AI, and automation for 2018—and beyond.

Onica, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting and Managed Service Partner, has acquired Sturdy Networks and NetBrains. Onica, which joined the AWS Partner Network (APN) in 2013, was recently spun out of CorpInfo with a $20 million growth equity investment. With the acquisitions Onica now holds more than 250 AWS certifications, 9 competencies, and a customer base consuming over $150 million of AWS services a year.

Panoply, Stitch, and Chartio are partnering to offer an Automatic Cloud Data Stack, allowing users to gain insights through data visualization. The combined solution includes a self-optimizing petabyte-scale data warehouse, a self-serve ETL pipeline, and a modern business intelligence platform with pre-built business dashboards.

SentryOne, a Charlotte-NC-based provider of solutions for optimizing SQL Server performance, has launched a Global Partner Network to better serve its customers and partners outside of the United States.

SolarWinds, a provider of IT management software has announced updates to SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM) 4.6, Server and Application Monitor (SAM), Database Performance Analyzer (DPA), and a broader set of email monitoring capabilities for on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments.

Oracle has announced general availability of the newest release of its flagship core banking application, Oracle FLEXCUBE V14. With FLEXCUBE V14, banks now have the choice of either deploying a pre-configured offering for a comprehensive solution or updating one line of business at a time.

Veeam Software has extended its portfolio of availability solutions to support Oracle Solaris and IBM AIX and operating environments, enabling enterprise customers to replace their legacy backup solution with a comprehensive data protection and availability solution to protect mission-critical applications, systems and data.

AWS has announced two new container capabilities—Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) and AWS Fargate Amazon EKS. The two new arrivals complement its existing Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and are intended to make it easier to deploy, manage, and scale container workloads on AWS.

Web scraping can be an invaluable skill to possess when working on data-related projects because many interesting analytics projects often start not with over-explored internal data, but with the treasure trove of information found on the web, according to authors, lecturers, and data scientists Seppe vanden Broucke and Bart Baesens. However, while the web holds a wealth of information, collecting and structuring web data can be a daunting prospect for many data practitioners, believes Baesens who has written a new book on the topic with vanden Broucke titled, Web Scraping for Data Science with Python. Here, Baesens expands on the techniques and uses for web scraping.

More and more organizations are moving their data to the cloud to capitalize on cost-efficiencies and time-to-value opportunities. The technologies underpinning big data and cloud computing are converging and offering businesses new capabilities for fast, easy, wide-ranging data access. However, only if integrated and managed properly.

There never has been a more interesting time to be involved in the data management field. Data not only has become "the new oil" but is also the catalyst that is powering organizations to new heights of success. The past year has seen the rise of powerful analytics and an embrace of new tools and platforms emerging to more effectively tap into the power that data offers. DBTA reached out to industry experts to document the most important trends shaping data management in 2018.

In the past, user groups were the place where you would meet people interested in the same thing you were. Vendors worked with the user groups to communicate new releases, and gather feedback on beta testing and leveraged them as a source for new features. The user group had a library of information, presentations, events, and ways to interact with other users and vendors. Now, with social tools, including Facebook, Slack, and LinkedIn, and powerful search engines such as Google and Bing, the question is: Are user groups still needed? They are, and here is why.

This year's PASS Summit packed more than 5,000 data professionals into the Washington State Convention Center for hardcore technical sessions covering all aspects of the Microsoft data platform. Here are some highlights.

Solution4strategy recently used BlueFinity's Evoke Platform to help roll out cloud-based apps for its customers. Solutions4strategy a provider of innovative software and consultancy services serving the Australian, U.K. and U.S. markets used the platform to launch a series of business apps that is helping drive its international business expansion.

Over the past few years, the scale, speed, and power of analytics have been dramatically transformed. The amount of data available from the internet, combined with advances in software to make use of it, has created a practice called "big data analytics." It can provide types of information that were not available in the recent past and it has the potential to do so in real-time.

Over the past 12 months, there have been many new initiatives aimed at boosting access to and adoption of artificial intelligence. Many resources need to be aligned, including data analytics and computing processing power. But the most important ingredient is human intelligence. AI will only succeed if it is working in partnership with human intelligence, and only humans can provide the business context that gives AI value. This will be the final issue of this newsletter for 2017, and we will resume publishing on January 8th. We wish all our readers a very happy and safe holiday season!

SolarWinds, a provider of IT management software, has released an all-new product and two advanced product updates in a major evolution of its SolarWinds Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) portfolio. The new capabilities are important, said Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products, SolarWinds, because application performance and the digital experience of users have a direct and significant impact on business success. With the stakes so high, the ability to monitor across logs, metrics, and tracing is essential, he added.

TIBCO Software, a provider of integration, API management, and analytics technologies has acquired Alpine Data, a cloud-based data science and social collaboration platform. TIBCO says the addition will bolster its data science technology and analytics portfolio, complementing solutions such as Statistica, Spotfire, and StreamBase to help companies accelerate insights and action.

erwin, Inc. has introduced erwin DG, a SaaS solution that expands data governance beyond IT, to enable all organizational stakeholders to discover, understand, govern, and socialize data to mitigate risk, improve organizational performance and accelerate growth. The solution is aimed at helping to mitigate a wide range of risks, from GDPR to cybersecurity, in order to protect customer trust and prevent reputational damage.

To meet increasing demands for cloud archiving, compliance and analytics, Barracuda Networks, a provider of cloud-enabled security and data protection solutions, has acquired privately held Sonian, a provider of public cloud archiving and business insights.

IBM announced a new IBM Cloud Private software platform to help companies unlock billions of dollars in technology investment in core data and applications and extend cloud-native tools across public and private clouds. IBM Cloud Private software is designed to enable companies to create on-premises cloud capabilities similar to public clouds to accelerate app development.

Built.io Flow, an integration-as-a-service (iPaaS) platform that unifies and automates disparate IT systems and cloud applications integrations through APIs, and Zilkr are partnering to offer a new integrated platform for telecommunications clouds. Together Built.io Flow and Zilkr extend workflow innovation by bringing telecommunication services and enterprise application products into integrated, automated business processes.

Percona has introduced version 1.5 of its free and open source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL and MongoDB performance. This new release improves support for MySQL on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Aurora, which simplifies configuration and usage, provides more efficient data collection and delivers faster resolution of Percona Support tickets.

Trifacta is expanding support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) along with releasing Wrangler Edge and Wrangler Enterprise on AWS Marketplace. Wrangler Edge and Wrangler Enterprise provide an intuitive, efficient way for teams and organizations to wrangle data across AWS services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Redshift for ML and visualization in applications including Amazon QuickSight.

Snowflake Computing has announced the public preview of Snowpipe, an automated service to load data into the Snowflake cloud data warehouse, that is built using Amazon SQS and other Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions.

One of the biggest challenges IT professionals responsible for corporate data will face in 2017 comes from a law passed by the European Union due to take effect in 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A metadata-driven approach is important for ensuring compliance with this new data privacy law.

Cloudera has announced the upcoming beta release of Cloudera Altus Analytic DB, a data warehouse cloud service that aims to bring the warehouse to the data through a cloud-scale architecture to eliminate costly data movement.

Data integration can seem like a never-ending quest as organizations try to combine and access data from disparate applications and sources. But as we move beyond relational as the only DBMS type that matters and embrace NoSQL and Hadoop data platforms, data integration can become more challenging and require new tools and approaches to achieve success.

SAP is updating the S/4HANA Cloud, making advances in machine learning, user experience, extensibility, and more. As announced in September at SAP TechEd, this latest release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud also includes the launch of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud software development kit (SDK), which provides a simple end-to-end development experience that enables SAP customers, partners, and independent software vendors (ISVs) to easily develop custom applications, extending the capabilities of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

In the latest installment of their Cloud Currents column for Big Data Quarterly, Michael Corey and Don Sullivan look at the EU's upcoming GDPR: Tic toc, tic toc—back and forth swings the privacy pendulum. While we in the U.S. continue to regress on issues of data privacy, the European Union (EU) is proceeding with bold steps to protect the privacy of its citizens. On May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes the law of the land in the EU. It applies to any company that processes or holds data on EU residents, regardless of where it is located in the world. Popular applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and Airbnb are among the companies that will be directly impacted by this law. If you do business with EU residents, regardless of geographic locality, this law directly applies to you.

MapR Technologies, a pioneer in delivering one platform for all data, across every cloud, has announced the availability of the MapR Converged Data Platform 6.0, with new advancements to help organizations achieve greater value from their data through DataOps teams. The major system update from MapR includes innovations that automate platform health and security, and a database for next-generation applications.

Hackolade has announced that its data modeling software tool has been granted certification for MongoDB Enterprise versions 2.6 through 3.4. This includes MongoDB instances deployed on premise, on the cloud, or with the MongoDB Atlas database service. The certification comes on the heels of Hackolade's recent announcement to support the latest version of MongoDB and MongoDB Atlas.

IBM says that customers will have access to its first commercially available quantum computing systems before the year is out. The company announced two significant quantum processor upgrades for its IBM Q early-access commercial systems. These upgrades represent rapid advances in quantum hardware. The first IBM Q systems available online to clients will have a 20 qubit processor, featuring improvements in superconducting qubit design, connectivity and packaging. Coherence times (the amount of time available to perform quantum computations) average 90 microseconds, and enable high-fidelity quantum operations.

Intel has announced the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series, a data center solid state drive, now available in a new 750GB capacity in both half-height, half-length add-in card and a hot-swappable 2.5-inch U.2 form factor. Both form factors and capacities will be broadly available this month.

Citus Data, a provider of a platform for scaling out Postgres databases, is unveiling new features for its Citus Cloud product, making it easier for fast-growing SaaS businesses to scale out without having to re-architect their application. Citus Cloud's suite of new features close the gap with NoSQL and are all about empowering developers from migration tools like Citus Warp, to the zero-downtime shard rebalancer, to offering fork and followers features in a distributed database.

Google has announced that the Google Cloud Platform's BigQuery Data Transfer Service is now publicly available. First introduced at Cloud Next, the Google BigQuery Data Transfer Service was created to automate data movement from SaaS applications to BigQuery on a scheduled, managed basis.

Raytheon and MetTel have announced a global security alliance aimed at protecting government and commercial communications networks against growing cybersecurity threats, including those that exploit the Internet of Things (IoT). The companies plan to provide cybersecurity offerings and support the migration from legacy technologies to ensure cybersecurity is designed into the government's telecom infrastructure.